Sweet Summer Easel Birthday Card Tutorial

Hello lovely crafters and welcome to another bit of craft inspiration from me – Terri Kelly (VeegsTez Creates). Today I am going to show you how to make a circular easel card, which is actually super easy to make, but is also a real mantel pleaser.

Supplies required:

• 6 inch square card blank
• 2 extra die cut circles
• Approx 6 inch die cutting circle die
• Die cutting machine
• Low tack/washi tape
• Distress Oxides or inks of choice for blending for the colourful background
• Ink blending tool of choice
• Scoreboard or steel edge ruler and bone folder
• Wet Glue
• Scissors suitable for fussy cutting
• Foam tape
• Sweet as candy pre-coloured stamps

Step 1

First of all you need to position your circle die so that a small part of it hangs over the fold in the card blank. You can tape this down with low tack tape or washi and run it through your die cutting machine of preference. This will mean that the card is held together still by the part that you didn’t cut. This is a great little hack as it means you can create shaped cards of any type!

Next you need to cut 2 extra circles of card. I cut one from yellow card stock as the card was going to be so beautifully bright and one from a smooth card stock, which is suitable for ink blending on.

Step 2

Next, you need to score a line across the width of your now circular card blank, with the hinge at the top. Burnish this score line carefully. The bottom half will be where you attach the front, decorative panel to. At this point, you can adhere your coloured circle to the back of the card. As my card was a thick card and my die cutting plates are well used, it left some unsightly marks on the back, which is why I wanted to cover it. Adding the extra circle also has the dual purpose of making the card sturdier too though.

Step 3

Next (or potentially first!), you need to choose which stamps you want to use on your project and resize them in a text document. With an easel card, you need to create a stopper, to allow the top of the card to stand up in easel mode. I chose a jelly bean and did not make it smaller. I added 4 of the jelly beans to the sheet and then fussy cut out all of the coloured images. When fussy cutting the orange jelly bean stopper, I cut up to the black line on 3 of them and left a small white border on one. I then glued the 3 smaller beans on top of each other and the 1 with the white border on top. For extra dimension I also used a small piece of foam tape. The next step is to fussy cut all of the other images leaving a small white border to make them stand out against the colourful background.

Step 4

The next part of the process is to prepare the top, decorative portion of the card. I used my magnetic, wipe clean mat to hold the circle down while I applied Distress Oxide Inks to the circle, from the bottom up. You could just use some removable adhesive on the back of your circle to hold it in place if you don’t have a mat like this. You need to choose colours that would blend into each other nicely, for example pink into yellow makes orange. As well as the three ink pads colours you can see in the below picture, I also used Tumbled glass – the pale blue at the top.

Once I had blended the colours together and was happy with the blend, I lightly spritzed the panel with some water to activate the ink and create a pretty, textured effect. Other brands of water reactive ink are available, but if you don’t have any, you could get a similar effect by using any ink that you have and that lightly splattering on some watered down white acrylic paint or white gesso with a paint brush, for a similar bit of added interest on the ink blended panel.

Once the circle is fully dry, apply strong glue to the bottom portion of the circular card and adhere the decorative panel to just the bottom half of the card base, being mindful not to get glue too close to the score line to ensure it didn’t affect the mechanism.

Step 5 – the most fun part!

Now comes the time to decorate your panel. I personally love designing layouts for cards. There is no wrong answer, just arrange everything and once you’re happy, glue it down! You could also do this part before you adhere the panel to the card base, it doesn’t matter which way around you do it.

Once fully decorated, fold the bottom half of the card up, and decide how far you want it to go back, This shows you where you need to adhere your stopper. Putting a pencil mark here is useful. I chose to leave room underneath, when the card is in easel mode, to have another sentiment. There was then still a decent amount of space at the top for your personal message, or alternatively you could write you message on the reverse of the card.

I had a few fussy cut images left, so placed 1 of the sweeties each side of the Happy Birthday sentiment to finish off the card.

I hope you have enjoyed today’s tutorial and if you haven’t tried making an easel card before, that you’ll give it a go. Make sure to tag Kate Hadfield Designs if you share your makes on social media, as we’d love to see them.

Happy crafting and see you again soon,
Terri/Veegstez Creates xxx

• Instagram
• Facebook
• YouTube

---

Materials Used: